Timothy Long - The Apocalypse and Satan's Glory Hole

He picks up a short microphone that looks like it came from an American Idiot game. There are little red and green buttons all over the side, and when he pushes them, crazy things happens, things that freak him out. One makes the house shift sideways. He can feel the foundation pick itself up and just move. He hits the button and the house moves again.

He shakes his head and hits another button. A pink string appears under his feet and snaps from the ground to the bottom of the mike. He almost drops the thing again. Instead he hurries back downstairs, and kicks Phil on his way to the bathroom. The pink string follows, and even when he puts it in his pocket, the stupid thing loops out the side of his pants and into the ground.

A whole day of weird, and this is the freakiest yet.

He chugs back a pair of Ativan and washes them down with water. Old faucet creaks and groans when he turns the handle. He leans over and takes a big old swallow, then another. Clean and cold. Just right. He opens his mouth wide and chugs more before a lump gets stuck in his throat.

He backpedals and falls on his ass. Phil jumps up and down and does his monkey screech, which is the equivalent of a big fuck you laugh.

The hell? He spits and belches and spits again. Tasted like piss and shit. Sure did, and when he stands up and looks at the faucet, he is horrified to see sewage running out of it. Guess the shifting house caused that. The shifting house? The shitting house!

Nathan P. Chuzzle wants to go back to bed. He wants to hide under the covers and wait for all of this to pass as surely it must. It’s probably all the pills catching up with him. He tried to warn Mom that it was too much, but she insisted. He isn’t bipolar, doesn’t even know what the word means. He also doesn’t have posttraumatic stress disorder from the clown days, no matter what she says. He can look a clown in the eye just as well as anyone else.

He took too much and is over the edge. That must be it. He looks at the wreckage of the room, at the smashed furniture and at the ripped-open walls and ceiling. He looks down at his pants where his hard cock sticks out like a tent.

He closes his eyes and takes the microphone out of his pocket. He holds it up and opens his eyes, sure that when he does the string will be gone and it will be a toy again.

But it’s not.

“SHIT AND COCKBUGS!” he screams. Phil bounces around behind him again, shrieking at the ceiling.

The microphone starts talking about Cockbugs. Starts singing about them all bouncy and peppy like it’s a kids song. It drives Chuzz right up against his last shred of sanity and twangs it like a loose guitar string. Twang twang. Twang! Shine your ebony guitar neck for a dollar Twang twang TWANG! Chuzz shakes his head and resists the urge to impale himself on a sharpened kitchen broom jammed in the bathroom drain. Tried to dig out a turd after Phil thought he could take a bath in the tub. Filled it all the way to the top and forgot to turn off the water. Stuff went everywhere like a mini flood. Took Chuzz days to clean up, but the turds stayed deep in the drain. He pretty much gave up on showers after that. Fucking Phil.

He checks his computer, but it is dead. Won’t boot up. Won’t even flicker. Weird, because the lights in the house are on. He hits the power button again, and the vacuum flies out of the closet. It smashes against the wall, and a little red creature falls off and rolls over a couple of times. It comes to a rest, and a fire starts around it. Chuzz looks around for something with which to put out the flames.

He snatches the glass off the bathroom counter and fills it with shit water, trying—unsuccessfully—not to get any on his hand, and then runs at the fire and tosses the stuff on it. The sludge splatters against the wall, the floor. It goes everywhere and smells like shit. Just like shit.

“’Cause it is shit,” he says.

“Cockbugs!” the little demon screams and spits out a finger, no, a little penis that wriggles around. “Had to be water! Two thousand years old and I get taken out by shit water. What a fucking waste.” And the little thing shakes, compresses like a balloon out of air, and bursts into hunks of meat that smell worse than the shit water.

Nathan P. Chuzzle has had some weird stuff happen in his life, and maybe he goes about the glory hole thing a little oddly, maybe a lot oddly. But he is not used to angels and demons popping up around him.

Nor is he used to teleporting microphones that speak to him in a weird, stilted computer voice.

“Chuzz… that you?”

“What?”

“Chuzz? You on a microphone or something?”

Chuzz looks at the thing and hits the little green knob on the side. A blast of reverb nearly deafens him and rearranges his hair. His ears ring, and the microphone dances in his grip. He speaks into it.

“Leon?”

“Chuzz? That you?”

“Leon?”

“Chuzz, what in the blue vision fuck is going on? Are you trapped inside the pussy?”

“Am I trapped inside the what? Are you out of your mind? How did you know about the blue shit?”

“Blue fucking what? Never mind! I don’t want to alarm you, Chuzz, but your voice is booming from something I fucked last night. The strange thing is, it doesn’t really shock me. I think the world is ending, Chuzz.”

“It’s not ending. It’s over. The craziest shit is going on.”

“You’re telling me, Brother.”

“I just had an angel visit me. He came inside and drank a beer, gave me a bunch of weird weapons and then flew off and was shot down by a missile. Oh man, Leon, it is good to hear your voice after the morning I’m having.”

“No shit. What the hell is happening, Chuzz? Is this really the end, or does the government just want us to think it is the end?”

“The end. It’s the end! I just killed a demon with shit water, Leon, and this gadget makes the place move, and if this is the government fucking with us, it’s a damn good trick. Everything is blue right now. BLUE! But that might be from the half bottle of Viagra I took on accident. BLUE! FUCKING BLUE!”

“Okay, Chuzz, you have to calm down. If shit water kills them, then we can fight back! As someone constantly pushed around and fucked with, I refuse to die at the hands of some damn demon!”

“You’re right. Calm down. Phew. But what the hell do we do now? What do we DO? I can’t take shit water with me. It’s, like, this stuff that comes out of my faucet.”

“Figure it out, Brother. We have to stop it! We can band together and attack the Apocalypse before it attacks us! Where are you, Chuzz? Are the Four Horsemen upon us already? I have to talk to Bud and the three priests at the church I clean; they can fill me in. It was insanely busy yesterday. I guess everyone else knew the world was ending.”

“Attack the Apocalypse! Are you insane?

The old TV in the corner clicks on, and a beautiful woman stands on screen. She is dressed in a sharp business suit complete with a collar around her neck. Her eyes are darkened, surrounded by something so red it has to be blood. She holds a microphone shaped like a dildo.

“Hang on. Something’s on the screen.”

“Huh?”

“Hang the fuck on!”

Silence from the irritating device. Then it starts click click clicking. Twang twang, there goes his sanity again. No, hold on! Hold on! He shakes his head and turns his attention to the screen.

The woman stands in front of a giant sign made out of body parts and flashing red and green lights. They spell out two words. SIN CITY.

The landscape is changing. Shifting, altering. Sand is tossed in the air, and then the ground buckles. A giant hole opens up and everything around it turns red. A pair of hills rise out of the ground.